Defense Science Board's Big, Scary Study

Typically, the senior scientists and military-industrial graybeards who sit on the Defense Science Board are asked to examine specific issues, one at a time. Stuff like directed energy weapons. Or combating improvised explosives. Or how long guardsmen and reservists should be deployed.
But this summer, the Board is being asked to make a very different examination, Inside Defense notes. Instead of drilling down deep, to study a specific problem, Board members are being asked to think expansively -- very, Very expansively -- and look at... well, pretty much every bad-case scenario an American bureaucrat could ever imagine. Asian economic growth, terrorist technological development, epidemics, famine, religious strife, faulty American manufacturing, biological weapons, hurricanes -- you name it, the Pentagon wants the Board to study it. And the members are supposed "identify possible solutions" and come up with innovative technologies, systems or operational concepts that can be applied... before it becomes a national crisis.
Better get going, boys.